Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Moral of this story - There are psychopaths on You Tube too.

‘YouTube’ gunman kills 10 in shooting spree at Finnish vocational college

September 23, 2008

Times Online: A Finnish student who killed nine people in a school massacre today had been questioned by police only yesterday about a YouTube video showing him firing a pistol on a shooting range.

A Finnish student who killed ten people in a college massacre today had been questioned by police only yesterday about a YouTube video showing him firing a pistol on a shooting range.

The student, identified as Matti Saari, a 22-year-old trainee chef, walked into the catering and tourism college in the remote western town of Kauhajoki at about 11am (0800GMT) and started firing at both fellow students and staff.

Some 90 minutes later he turned the gun on himself, but survived and died of his injuries five hours later in a hospital bed. The initial death toll was put at nine, but police later updated it to 10, not counting the killer.

It was Finland’s second school massacre in under a year and left the country in a state of shock. The YouTube connection – Saari posted a number of handgun videos on the site – bore disturbing echoes of the tragedy last November when an 18-year-old high school student killed eight people after posting a “massacre manifesto” on the video-sharing site.

But the revelation that the killer was questioned by police less than 24 hours before the spree is likely to prove especially painful.

Anne Holmlund, the Finnish Interior Minister, told reporters that police had questioned the man after being tipped off by the public about his YouTube videos but had no legal reason to detain him and decided not to withdraw his gun permit.

“The gunman had a temporary permit for a .22 calibre pistol, and he had received it in August 2008. It was his first gun,” she said. “Police action will be examined in more detail later.”

The shootings occurred almost a year after Pekka-Eric Auvinen, Finland’s original “YouTube killer”, shot dead eight people including the headmistress at a high school in the southern town of Jokela, before shooting himself.

Auvinen had posted a “massacre manifesto” on the video-sharing website in which he declared: “I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit.”

The Finnish Government has since dropped its objection to a European Union directive setting a minimum age limit on firearm ownership, although ministers said that the decision was not linked to the Jokela shooting.

With 1.6 million firearms in private hands, Finland has the world’s third highest rate of gun ownership, behind only the United States and Yemen.

Antti Rantakokko, the mayor of Kauhajoki, said that there were echoes of Jokela in today’s incident. “On the internet there is some information, there are analogies to the Jokela case,” he said.

He appeared to be referring to the YouTube page on which was posted four videos filmed by a user calling himself “Mr Saari”. The videos, between 20 and 32 seconds long, show a man dressed in black or dark colours, firing at a shooting range with a Walther P22 handgun.

The killer – who last visited the site about an hour before the shootings started – posted under the username Wumpscut86 in homage to an “electro-industrial” DJ from Bavaria known as Wumpscut. He includes some of Wumpscutt lyrics on his profile: “And suddenly there was war and the mothers they screamed. For revenge and reprisals for another war.”

The same man also posted videos on other websites, including one where he points at the camera and declares, in English, “You will die next”, before firing his weapon repeatedly.

Witnesses described a scene of chaos and terror at the “School of Hospitality” in Kauhajoki, 220 miles (360km) northwest of Helsinki.

“I heard the sound of shooting and hysterical girls’ voices. Then two girls came towards my room and said a weird man was shooting,” said Jukka Forsberg, the school janitor. “I went to see and saw a guy leaving a big black bag in the corridor and going into classroom number three and closing the door.

“I looked through window and he immediately shot at me. Then I called the emergency number, Thank God I was not hit.”

The headmaster in a school next door to the building where the drama occurred, Tapio Varmola, also described horrifying scenes. “People were running out of the building in two directions. When I went out I didn’t hear any shots, only screams,” he told the STT news agency.

The gunman was wearing a ski mask during the attack and may also have been carrying explosives. Fire department officials said that the school had been set on fire in several locations.